And there’s the rub. The men’s national team does not play on artificial turf. Even when it schedules a game in a stadium that has it, sod is laid down for the game, no matter the cost. The women, however, were to play eight of the 10 games of their current World Cup victory tour on artificial turf.
There is big money in college football. In 2014, the University of Missouri football team generated$14,229,128. Coach Gary Pinkel recently received asalary increase from $3.1 million to about $4 million; Wolfe, by contrast, made $459,000 per year. His decision to step down prevented substantial financial losses to the university.
.. Therefore, the parties agree that if one party cancels (hereafter, the “defaulting party”) any game or games, the defaulting party shall pay as liquidated damages to the other party One Million Dollars ($1,000,000) for each cancelled game, to be paid no later than thirty (30) days following the scheduled game.
.. The resignation of Wolfe may signal a short-term victory for minority populations at universities, but it signals something else, too: the economic stranglehold that college football has on the decisions made by these institutions. The experiences of racism at the University of Missouri needed to be addressed, and it appears that it took those with the most financial influence to make that happen.
Many wondered what would happen when the team needed a single player to take a game-winning shot in the absence of a clear hierarchy.
The concerns that Miami lacked a clear hierarchy turned out to be well-founded. In late-game situations, the Heat’s execution and coordination was disastrous.
.. Intrigued by this idea, we set out to analyze 10 years of NBA performance with Roderick Swaab of the business school INSEAD. Our analysis revealed exactly what we saw with the Miami Heat: At a certain point, adding more top talent caused teams’ winning percentages to go down rather than up. These teams simply had too much talent.
.. It turns out that for basketball teams, steeper hierarchies lead to better performance. Why? Teams with a clear pecking order passed the ball more effectively. They had more assists, and as a result, players made more of their shots.
.. The United States Olympic basketball committee recently came to appreciate the problem of too much talent.
.. In order to maximize egg production, sellers selectively breed the chickens who lay the most eggs. But something goes terribly wrong when you place a high number of the best egg-producing chickens in one colony: Total cage-wide production plummets. And, even worse, chicken deaths skyrocket. Why? Because, the best egg producers also happen to be the most competitive birds, and when they are brought together, they begin fighting over food, space, and territory. They peck each other to death.
.. If your ring finger is considerably longer than your index finger, you were exposed to greater levels of testosterone back in your mom’s womb. If your two fingers are similar in length, it indicates that you were exposed to less testosterone in utero.
It may seem ridiculous to use finger length to determine anything about a person’s behavior, but our work with Richard Ronay of VU University shows that high levels of prenatal testosterone exposure makes people sensitive to threats to their place on the hierarchical ladder. High-testosterone people, in other words, are more likely to feel disrespected.
.. But sometimes more talent is better. Consider baseball.
.. hierarchy is most useful in situations where coordination is the key to success; thus, the key to whether or not you can have “too much talent” hinges on how much the group performance requires coordination between the team’s members.
.. Bill Simmons referred to baseball as “an individual sport masquerading as a team sport.”